To be fair, "more of the same" is the Republican motto
Sen. Marco Rubio has formalized his previous Cuba policy hissy fit into a fully realized op-ed hissy fit. Let's see if he has any policy recommendations of his own, other than "let's try another fifty years of this," or if something something Obama bad is all we're
going to get.
The announcement by President Obama on Wednesday giving the Castro regime diplomatic legitimacy and access to American dollars isn’t just bad for the oppressed Cuban people, or for the millions who live in exile and lost everything at the hands of the dictatorship. Mr. Obama’s new Cuba policy is a victory for oppressive governments the world over and will have real, negative consequences for the American people.
Again, though, the question here is not whether the Castro regime is bad. We're all clear on that. The question is (1) why our policy toward Cuba is, compared to all of the petty thieves and bullheaded oligarchs we happily shake hands with, unique, and (2) whether an existing policy that the rest of the world ignores and which has not succeeded in damaging the regime in decades but which continues to reserve most of its negative effects for families divided between the two countries should continue, or should be revamped, or should be scrapped.
As a result, it has been the policy and law of the U.S. to make clear that re-establishing diplomatic and economic relations with Cuba is possible—but only once the Cuban government stops jailing political opponents, protects free speech, and allows independent political parties to be formed and to participate in free and fair elections.
It would be admirable if we did not deal with nations like that. We do. We go out of our way to call many of them "friends."
Reasonable people can disagree about the efficacy of American foreign policy toward Cuba and even the embargo, but no serious person can argue that the manner in which President Obama unilaterally granted concessions to the regime in Havana was well advised.
Please read more on this story below the fold.
Sure we can. Reasonable people can also argue that if you've been driving nails into your skull for fifty years to see what would happen but nothing good ever did, you should stop and reassess your decision. What did we "get" from Vietnam for the normalization of relations, other than yet another cheap supply of offshore labor?
American foreign policy affects every aspect of American life, and our people cannot realize their full promise if the world becomes more dangerous because America retreats from its role in the world. Moreover, the Cuban people have the same rights that God bestowed on every other man, woman and child that has ever lived.
Except the ones we suspect of crimes, who we are allowed to torture because they do not have God-given rights. We got those op-eds last week, I seem to recall.
All right, so there's not going to be any opposing policy suggestions other than "do what we are doing, forever, rather than stop doing the thing that even our own op-eds say has not led to anything positive." I realize that the pages of the Wall Street Journal are not exactly a breeding ground for new and innovative thoughts, but it's still eyebrow-raising to see that a foreign policy can fail for fifty years and still have staunch advocates growling that it just needs a bit more time.
The primary motivation for existing policy is merely to continue it until the Castro family dies of old age, after which embargo proponents can declare a great symbolic victory over their mouldering corpses and, presumably, eagerly start doing business with the inheritors of that regime regardless of how little it actually changes. While "spite" is indeed a powerful foreign policy force, however, it would not seem an entirely sufficient one.